Many jurisdictions have restrictions on moving contributions between pools in a progressive system so as to avoid commingling of funds between different progressive pools. These rules ensure that all progressives which players have contributed to will eventually be paid back to players and that the accounting of the pools has a continuous chain of control.
However, there are business requirements and other reasons why it might be desirable to move contributions between pools. For example, taking a machine off the floor may remove an internal progressive pool used by the machine. In this regard, taking a machine off the floor may necessitate the transfer of the internal progressive pool funds used by the machine elsewhere so the funds may eventually be paid back to players. As another example, a particular progressive game title may be poor-performing, which may result in a casino repurposing an entire bank of machines presenting the poor-performing progressive game title to a new game title that may or may not be a progressive game title. Even if the new game title is also progressive, the new game title will not usually have the same cost-to-jackpot (“CTJ”) and progressive related pool requirements as the game title being replaced.
It is unknown when a jackpot or other event will trigger, thereby depleting a progressive pool to zero contributions. Therefore, techniques that involve leaving a poor-performing progressive game title in action (e.g., on a casino game floor available for play) until a jackpot hits may not be desirable due to the nondeterministic nature of a jackpot triggering. Such techniques become very undesirable when gaming machines may dynamically install and uninstall games. As the number of progressive game titles and the corresponding progressive pools increase, keeping each pool separate hinders the ability for a gaming establishment to reconfigure gaming machines presenting poor-performing game titles to adapt to player demand.
Thus, there remains a need for systems and methods which ensure that, when the progressive pool associated with the progressive game title is removed from play, the players who have contributed to the pool are eventually paid back. Ideally, this should be accomplished without requiring that the poor-performing game title trigger a jackpot (or otherwise deplete the progressive pool down to the point where zero player contributions are left in the pool) before being removed. In this regard, there remains a need to address these and other concerns.